…as Deb pointed out over the weekend, so here goes:

March: sucked about as much as February did. I need to live in a mall.

Sleep: a little better over the past week, week and a half. Mostly on normal day/night for the past 12 days, which is one of the longer stretches since I started logging sleep/wake times, but there’s a lot of napping in there that probably shouldn’t be. 3 of those 12 days didn’t have naps, and 2 of them had multiple naps. The rest had single naps. I guess “naptime” is a nice thing to have, but I’d like it to be at a steady time, and not at the least opportune time(s) possible. Wrecked my Sunday. I also did a little bit of math this past week, and figured out that, in the time I’ve been logging my sleep/wake times, I’ve managed to get at least 8 hours sleep and wake up between 7 AM-10 AM approximately 10.6% of the time in the past year and two-thirds or so. I want to widen my count a bit, add the 6 AM-7 AM hour, and count days with between 6-8 hours sleep to see how far up that percentage goes. I’m thinking it’ll be 20%-ish at best, but from what I saw, probably more like 15-17% of the time. Not being more than a very amateur sleep researcher, I have no idea how this compares to the rest of the population. Chances are, a lot of you could be just as fucked as I am. I’d at least like to know my stats, though, and move forward from there. Data brings opportunities to focus on areas that need improvement.

Drugs: no complaints at the moment, really. Like I said a month and a half ago, I’ve been a bit down over the Winter months, but that’s probably got more to do with stress and cabin fever than it does with drug effectiveness. I’ll know for sure by July.

Therapy: going well, but kind of in a holding pattern, I think. I could be making progress and just not noticing it yet. I’ll have to talk about that this week.

Running: yes, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, and will still kind of have to wait a little while longer for, but there is news. I haven’t run since my last update (you’d have read about it here if I had), but I walked 5, count ‘em, 5 miles on Sunday. It was slightly ill-advised to try it, but I wanted to see what short-term and long-term effects it would have on both the good leg and the bad one. Here’s what I noticed:

• Slight blistering on my feet that’s healing fine (we stopped short of where it would’ve been a problem), the knee started giving me crap around the 4 mile mark, and that was about it as it was in progress.
• Next day, knee barking at me and left calf pain in the usual spot early, followed by what felt like “normal” shin splint-ish pain late in the day in both legs, kind of that “Oh, I exercised too much after a lot of time off” feeling, but normal, and completely unrelated to the condition I’ve had up and down my left calf, totally different sensation. This is useful data!
• Today, sore shins and that’s about it.

I haven’t been to a doctor since November (and didn’t get X-Rays then, because the prospect of yet another Charity Care application gave me hives), because the free clinic near me takes forever to get into, and I’ve been holding out for Medicaid, which I *should* have this week, so I can go wherever the hell I want and not stretch the clinic’s resources any thinner. Keep your fingers crossed that the gummint was nice enough to mail my stupid card. The marathon is probably out for ’09, sadly (I haven’t totally ruled it out yet, but I don’t know what’s wrong or how much recuperation time/effort will be needed to fix it with a few weeks left to register), but if I get things looked at, find solutions, and get healthy, I should be in DAMN good shape for ’10.

Money stuff: it took a lot of effort, and there was a HUGE amount of incompetence on the gummint’s part (surprise!), but the first phase of The Scott Crawford Government Bailout Package finally went into effect at the end of this past week. Got a bunch of food in the house, paid some bills, put a little bit in savings, bought me some pants, and did a little bit of frivolous crap (I don’t relish the idea, but it’s kind of hard not to when you sit in a waiting room watching the blinged-out “poor and destitute” play with their iPhones for a few months; for the record, I didn’t buy an iPhone, still can’t afford one…). It was a very modest start, even with a few months’ back payments because it took them so long to get me through the system (apparently, there were some cases they’re still working on from October and November of last year; what are those people doing, in the meantime?), but it was a start nonetheless. I now have enough coming in for me to feed myself, pay a few small bills, and gas up a car I can’t afford to maintain or pay for the insurance on (thankfully, I’m getting help with that from family). My legal case is moving along in slow, mostly quiet increments in the meantime. Hopefully, I’ll have a “yes” or “no” answer (leaning toward the former) by the end of the summer. I’ve already been through this whole mess once, 6 1/2 years ago, and nothing’s improved in the ways that the workplace would need it to, even with increased psychological care, so I’d kind of rather that this doesn’t go into the appeals process yet again. In the meantime, as always, if you’d like to help me out in any way (always greatly appreciated), here’s how you can do it. Not all solutions are monetary, but the money certainly helps. Thanks in advance.

Music: the poking has slowed some, but I’m still thinking about it. I am also probably going to release all of my recorded output here, very soon, for free (donations appreciated, of course), under a Creative Commons license of some sort. Stay tuned!

Writing: I’m writing right now. I’ve done some more of that other writing of late, too (not so much over the past week, but I spent the better part of a month scribbling recently), progress is being made there. I’m going to need a team of artists to work on that with me, though. If you’re game, suck@mybigblackcock.com.

Second Life: Heck still exists. Been a little more activity there lately, but not a lot. Stop in sometime, link’s in the sidebar.

Higher education: as I said last time, “I’m considering it after the court case is done. Again, though, I need to be sure I’m in a position where I can do it. Even correspondence courses have deadlines.” In the meantime, though, I’m looking into doing some independent studying, mostly on foreign languages and creating comic books. I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes.

That’s what’s up. Did I forget to mention anything?

Hi there, folks. As some of you may have heard, comic book writer/editor/all-around swell guy Len Wein had a pretty horrible fire at his home 2 weeks ago. He and his family got out safe, but he sadly lost his dog, Sheba, and he lost a lot of his stuff, including his entire comics collection, spanning 4 decades of his work in the field. Remember, this guy co-created Swamp Thing, Wolverine, the rest of the new X-Men and a bunch of others (the man should’ve gotten a medal for Brother Voodoo alone!), edited Watchmen, and did some very memorable runs on pretty much every major character on the big two comic companies’ roster, so just the stuff he worked on as writer or editor is substantial, and the entire comics community pretty much owes this guy a living just for Wolverine alone.

Thankfully, people are already hard at work on helping Len out. Writer and equally swell guy Mark Evanier has organized The “Let’s Rebuild Len Wein’s Comic Book Collection” Project, an effort to at least get Len copies of all the books he worked on as a starting point for his new comics collection, and it seems to be progressing nicely. There’s still definite holes in the pledge list, though, so head over to Mark’s site for the project, take a look at the regularly-updated checklist (warning: PDF format, get Foxit Reader if you’re on Windows because Adobe Reader sucks, or xpdf if you’re on anything Unix-flavored; Mac users are covered with Preview) and see if you’ve got anything you can help out Len with. It’s a terrific thing to do for a guy who’s done a lot for comics, and I’m very glad that Mark and the comics community have jumped into action like they have. There’s not a lot in my personal collection that I’m able to part with (I’ll be looking through my Action Comics, Batman, and Power Man books today), but you might be able to fill stuff in where I’m not, or you may be able to help us all spread the word about this very worthwhile project. Thanks in advance for your help!

…April Fool’s Day or otherwise, is to come up with the most far-out possibility you can, but “possibility” is a key word there. There has to be something strangely believable about it, something that isn’t obviously bullshit and, if possible, is just shy of “I can debunk this with a Google search or a visit to Snopes” territory. Now, where you go from there is your call (and different approaches to this use different kinds and levels of social capital), but that’s where you have to start.

From looking at what people put out there this year, the most effective prank anyone could’ve pulled, on the ‘net or otherwise, would have been for Facebook to revert the appearance of their layout to what it was 2 layouts ago (the “old old Facebook”, which was what their layout looked like when the site began to reach critical mass). It was probably too ambitious for them to do for a one-day joke, and people would’ve gone BALLISTIC when they figured out that they hadn’t really made a permanent switch back to their most popular layout, but if I were Loki, the god of mischief, that’s what I would’ve done today. It would’ve caused a worldwide uproar. Of course, going back to that “social capital” point, they would’ve spent a lot of theirs on it, because one of the things that can really piss people off about a prank or a hoax (though, like one of the cornerstones of the prank’s malevolent cousin the scam, it can be ruthlessly effective) is preying on their hopes. Very fine line there.

Other stuff to avoid if possible is anything involving faking your own death (it may have worked for Andy Kaufman, but for the rest of us, it’s kinda tough), injuries/deaths in general, pregnancy announcements (or, unless you’re really fucking twisted, miscarriage announcements if you’re pregnant; that one, I’ve never seen, but again, people would lose their minds), sexual orientation or gender change announcements, engagement/marriage announcements (for instance, Bill Maher and Ann Coulter could say they eloped, but c’mon…), stark changes in belief systems, that sort of thing. No one wants to hear about how the Atheist has found Jeebus, how the Democratic/liberal lifer has joined the ‘Palin ’12 campaign, and so forth, and worse yet, most people won’t buy it.

It’s actually kinda tough to pull off a truly great prank without being either mundane, mean, or, as my pal Trent Reznor was today, overly smug. (C’mon, Trent…you’re really not *that* far away from being what you made fun of…) I guess this is why we put the great ones up on a pedestal. I’m actually not sure if I’ve ever pulled off a really great one, either, so I’m not going to be too holier-than-thou here. Having seen a lot of attempts this year that fall short of the mark, though, I kinda wanted to say something about the subject so that people (myself included; I’m certainly thinking out loud here) can possibly produce better results next year, or on non-designated prank days.